Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  Polyaenus, a Macedonian lawyer from Bithynia, wrote a military treatise for the Roman emperors Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius in AD 161. In it he claimed that the mythic hero Hercules had changed the course of a river in Greece to destroy the Minyans because he was afraid to face such skilled cavalrymen in open battle. The story was intended to justify reliance on devious tricks, instead of risky face-to-face battles, for the co-emperors who were facing a daunting war against the invincible Parthians of Central Asia. The Parthians, renowned for their armored cavalry and formidable horse archers, had just invaded the eastern empire and, in fact, were never defeated by the Romans.

  Cunning tricks like diverting rivers to gain access to a city or to cause floods are examples of creative unconventional warfare, not true biological strategies based on special natural knowledge. Unless such ploys killed entire populations by drowning (as occurred in some Islamic attacks by flooding in the early Middle Ages) diverting rivers aroused little moral tension, because a well-prepared city or army should be able to anticipate or counter such tactics. But secretly poisoning the water or food supplies that the enemy must depend on was another matter—and such insidious practices often raised ethical questions in ancient societies. In the Punic Wars against Carthage in North Africa (264-146 BC), for example, the Romans were accused of polluting wells with carcasses of animals. But many Romans bristled at the idea of resorting to poisons of any sort in warfare, as not in keeping with traditional ideals of Roman courage and battle skills.8

  After a revolt was quelled in Asia in 129 BC, for example, disturbing reports circulated in Rome claiming that the consul Manius Aquillius had defeated the rebelling cities by pouring poison in their cisterns. Aquillius was a cold-blooded general notorious for his harsh military discipline—whenever his lines were broken by the enemy, it was his habit to behead three men from each century (a unit of one hundred) whose position was breached. The historian Florus, who compiled his grandiose History of All the Wars over 1,200 Years in about AD 140, described what happened in Asia.

  The insurrection, led by Aristonicus of Pergamum, challenged Roman rule in the newly declared Province of Asia Minor. The rebellion was especially threatening to the Romans because Aristonicus was mobilizing slaves and lower classes, and he was succeeding: Several important cities in Asia Minor had joined the revolt before the Romans arrived in 131 BC. Aristonicus was captured at last and executed in Rome, and Aquillius, wrote Florus, “finally brought the Asian war to a close.” But his victory was a clouded one, because Aquillius had used “the wicked expedient of poisoning the springs to procure the surrender” of the rebel cities. Florus was clear about the immorality of such measures. “This, though it hastened his victory, brought shame upon it, for he had disgraced the Roman arms, which had hitherto been unsullied by the use of foul drugs.” Aquillius’s measures, thundered Florus, “violated the laws of heaven and the practice of our forefathers.”

  Florus’s ringing condemnation of “un-Roman warfare” would have appealed to many Romans. His patriotic nostalgia obscured earlier incidents of well- and crop-poisonings in the Romans’ ruthless wars against Carthage, however, not to mention countless political assassinations by poison during the republic and empire. Tacitus, the moralistic historian of the reigns of Rome’s first two emperors, Augustus and Tiberius, referred to similar nostalgic ideals of honor in his Annals of Imperial Rome. In AD 9, a rebellion in Germany led by the brilliant chieftain Arminius had resulted in the treacherous destruction of three Roman legions. The Germans had cleverly lured the legionaries into the marshy Teutoburg Forest (near Osnabruck) and slaughtered them as the men and horses foundered in the difficult terrain. A war-chief of the neighboring Chatti tribe wrote to the emperor Tiberius offering to poison Arminius.

  Professing to be deeply offended by the offer, the emperor replied to the Chatti chief: “Romans take vengeance on their enemies, not by underhanded tricks, but by open force of arms.” By this “elevated sentiment,” commented Tacitus, Tiberius compared himself to noble “generals of old” who had rejected plans to poison the invader Pyrrhus when he was ravaging Italy in the third century BC. “We Romans have no desire to make war by trickery,” had been their reply to the would-be assassins.

  Historians like Tacitus and Florus and their audiences greatly admired Virgil, the poet-propagandist commissioned by the emperor Augustus to write the epic saga of the glorious origins of Rome and the story of how the legendary forefathers of Rome, the Trojans, had colonized Italy after the Trojan War. The imperial historians chose to overlook a salient passage in Virgil’s Aeneid, in which stated that among Rome’s founders there was an expert at poisoning arrows and spears.9

  Besides poisoning a city’s wells, one could take advantage of naturally unhealthy environments—or even create a contaminated environment to sicken and disable foes. Contaminating water and vegetation along the route of an enemy’s march was a well-known stratagem in ancient India and Kautilya’s Arthashastra suggested several poison mixtures for polluting the foodstuffs and drink of the enemy. In Book 14, chapter 1, “Ways to Injure an Enemy,” he described powders and ointments made from various plants, animals, insects, and minerals that caused blindness, disease, insanity, lingering death, or instantaneous death. Some of the ingredients were thought to have magical properties (crabs, goat hoof, snake skin, cow urine, ivory, peacock feathers), but many others were truly poisonous. There was special smoke to destroy “all animal life as far as it is carried off by the wind,” and certain compounds that would poison grass and water to kill livestock. One powerful mixture of toxic plants and minerals could contaminate a large reservoir “one hundred bows long”: it killed all the fish and any creature who drank or even touched the water. One could even poison “merchandise,” such as spices or cloth, and send it to the foe.

  Notably, Kautilya also provided remedies for these biological weapons, in case of backfire that threatened one’s own troops, or retaliation in kind by enemies. Other Indian writers explained how to counter military poisons, too. According to an ancient medical treatise by Susruta, the Susruta Samhita, composed between the sixth century and first century BC, deliberately polluted water could be detected and purified with mineral and plant antidotes, and special rituals. Water that has been poisoned, wrote Sushruta, “becomes slimy, strong-smelling, frothy, and marked with dark lines on the surface. Frogs and fish die without apparent cause [and] birds and beasts on its shores roam about wildly in confusion from the effects of the poison.” Countermeasures against biological contaminants combined practical agents such as charcoal or clay and alcohol, each of which have natural filtering and purifying capabilities against toxins and bacteria, along with magical incantations. For example, Sushruta recommended purification of contaminated water with ashes, an effective form of charcoal filtering. For earth, stone slabs, and animal fodders that had been poisoned, Sushruta listed antidotes such as sprinkling with perfumes, wine, black clay, and the bile of brown cows, and beating drums smeared with “anti-poisonous compounds.” Again, alcohol in wine and the absorptive clay would have had disinfectant and filtering effects.10

  Avoidance of diseases and unwholesome environments that endangered their men was a key concern for military leaders. Xenophon, the Greek mercenary commander who recorded his memoirs in the fourth century BC, advised leaders to vigilantly guard the health of their soldiers. “First of all, always camp in a healthy place.” By this he meant camping where the air and waters were pure, avoiding swamps and other places where the water and atmosphere were insalubrious and caused illness.

  Some lakes, streams, and valleys were infected by “miasma,” an exhalation or atmosphere known to be harmful to living things (miasma is the ancient Greek word for “pollution”). These vapors and waters were said to be so deadly that animals died on the spot and birds flying overhead dropped out of the sky. A number of these locales were places like Ephyra in western Greece, identified as entrances to the Underworld, where noxious plants thrived. Modern
sciences shows that some of these locales were in fact geologically active thermal sites, where fumeroles and hot springs emitted bad-smelling sulphurous and other poisonous gases from the earth. In antiquity there was a strong association between foul odors and disease, based on experience and observation, and geologists have shown that methane and other fumes released from the earth can adversely affect humans and wildlife.11

  A mythic explanation was also offered to explain the origin of a stinking marsh in the Peloponnese so baneful that the fish in it were toxic. It was rumored to be the place where a group of Centaurs, wounded by Hercules’ poison arrows, had attempted to wash away the Hydra venom. A similar place of toxic exhalations, caused by the poison arrows that killed the Centaur Nessus, was known to exist near Kirrha, the town destroyed by poison. The ancient idea that the water, land, and atmosphere had been contaminated by poison weapons from the past finds a modern counterpart in the deadly environmental pollution caused by testing or dumping biochemical and nuclear weapons.

  Swamps and marshes in general were considered dangerous to the health, and with good reason: wetlands with stagnant water were breeding places of mosquitoes carrying malaria, which was endemic in certain areas in antiquity. The exact causes of fevers that emanated from swamps were not understood, but the health benefits of draining marshes was already recognized as early as the fifth century BC, when the natural philosopher-doctor Empedocles alleviated the raging fevers (now known to be malaria) that beset the Sicilian town of Selinus, by devising a sophisticated hydraulic engineering plan to drain the swamps there. (Malaria was not fully eradicated from Italian marshlands until the 1950s.)

  Varro (116-27 BC), Rome’s most erudite scholar, anticipated modern epidemiology when he stated, “Precautions must be taken in the neighborhood of swamps,” because they “breed certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases.” Lucretius, a natural philosopher writing in about 50 BC, also offered a perceptive theory of invisible microbes. “In the earth there are atoms of every kind,” and although “certain atoms are vital to us, there are countless others flying about that are capable of instilling disease and hasten death.” When these harmful atoms accumulate in mists or in earth rotted by too much water, the “air grows pestiferous.” These “hurtful particles enter the body [and] many noxious ones slip in through the nostrils” when we breathe; some enter through the skin; and many are ingested through the mouth. By inhaling polluted atmospheric particles from places like swamps, wrote Lucretius, “we can’t help absorbing these foreign elements into our system.”

  According to the historian Livy (first century BC) the pernicious effects of making camp in stagnant swamps brought disease to the Gauls who had sacked Rome in about 390 BC. Livy and the historian Diodorus of Sicily both described the contagion that assailed the Greeks and the Carthaginians fighting around Syracuse (Sicily) in 397 BC. The Carthaginians were harder hit, being unused to the unhealthy climate and water. “They perished to a man, together with their generals.”

  Looking back to the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, Diodorus of Sicily surmised that the disease had been a result of floods the previous wet winter, which created marshes filled with “putrid, foul vapors which corrupted the air” and spoiled the crops. The Athenians, trapped in their crowded city by the Spartans that hot summer, he noted, were especially susceptible to disease. By the fourth century AD, it was a commonplace among generals that “an army must not use bad or marshy water.” “Foul water is like poison and causes plagues,” cautioned the Roman military strategist Vegetius. Moreover, if an army camps too long in one place, the air and water “become corrupt [and] unhealthy.” Without frequent changes of camp, he wrote, “malignant disease arises.”12

  Xenophon’s advice to always camp in a healthy place was based in part on his knowledge of what befell the Athenians on their ill-fated expedition against Sicily in 415-413 BC. The swamp fevers that decimated the Greeks during the Sicilian disaster were described by Thucydides, Diodorus of Sicily, and Plutarch (first century AD). These historians all agreed that the Athenians’ crushing defeat in Sicily was attributable in part to fevers (probably malaria) contracted in the marshes where they made their summer bivouacs. Diodorus of Sicily pointed out that the Carthaginians who were annihilated by pestilence in 397 BC camped in the same place where the Athenians had camped.

  It is not clear whether the Athenians made the fatal mistake of camping in malarial swamps on their own, or whether the Sicilians “took particular measures to lead the Athenians into such noxious conditions.” But, as Thucydides repeatedly demonstrated, the Sicilians were hyperaware of denying advantageous terrain to the Greeks, constantly depriving them of water and opportunities for foraging. It’s very likely that the Athenian invaders succumbed to a biological subterfuge by the Sicilians.

  Some modern military writers exclude “maneuvering of armies into ‘unsanitary’ areas” from their discussions of biological warfare, but as Grmek notes, in antiquity this was an effective strategy based on sound biological knowledge. Knowing the ill effects of local marshes and rank water, an astute commander would ask, “How can I manipulate these naturally malignant miasmas against my enemies?” Luring or driving an enemy into these virtual minefields of microbes could be decisive.13

  The German tribes were masterful at maneuvering enemies into lethal landscapes. When the Romans were fighting the Teutons in 106 BC, the military writer Frontinus assumed that the Roman engineers “had heedlessly chosen a campsite” near the Germans’ stronghold without realizing that the only water supply was the river flowing along the enemy palisades. Teuton archers would pick off anyone who attempted to drink. In this case, though, the site may have been selected by the commander, Marius, on purpose. The historian Plutarch says that Marius intended to goad his men into attacking fiercely by the biological expedient of thirst. When his desperate soldiers complained, he pointed to the river between the camp and the Teuton fort. “There is your water,” replied Marius, “but it must be bought with blood.” The Romans begged to be given the order to storm the fort “before our blood dries up!”

  Recalling Germanicus Caesar’s arduous campaigns in Germany in the first century AD, Pliny the Elder noted that noxious plants and beasts were not the only treacherous things in the countryside. Certain geographical areas and their waters were also “guilty of harm.” The Germans consistently forced the Romans to fight and camp in unhealthy marshes and boggy woods (especially around modern Osnabruck), where the legionaries were easily ambushed and suffered extremely heavy losses. Tacitus described the emotions of Germanicus and his men when they came upon the jumbled masses of skeletons of horses and mutilated men, all that remained of the three Roman divisions that had been massacred six years earlier in the “sodden marsh-land and ditches” of the Teutoburg Forest by Arminius and his men. When the Romans finally managed to maneuver the Germans into fighting on level, dry ground, reported Tacitus, a spontaneous war cry rang out: “It’s a fair fight! On fair ground!”

  Pliny was intrigued by the experience of the veterans of Germanicus’s campaign who had been forced to camp in the coastal wetlands of northern Germany, where there was only one place to draw drinking water. Drinking it caused disease, and even the survivors lost all their teeth and suffered severe degeneration of the joints. Ever optimistic about nature’s balance, Pliny pointed out that a remedy for these maladies grew in the swampy area, a kind of aquatic weed called britannica, known to the locals. The German manipulation of the Roman legions into a place where they would be forced to drink the infected water without knowledge of the antidote was most likely a biological stratagem.14

  A particularly villainous strategic use of insalubrious terrain occurred a century or so after the Greek defeat in Sicily. What makes this event especially reprehensible is that it was the commander himself who plotted the destruction of his own men. The story comes from P
olyaenus, the strategist who compiled a history of how to protect armies and overcome barbarians for the emperors at the beginning of the Parthian War.

  Drawing on several historical accounts, Polyaenus told how Clearchus, a cruel tyrant (one of several evil tyrants who had studied with the philosopher Plato), took power in Heraclea, on the Black Sea, in 363 BC. He surrounded himself with mercenaries, and ordered them to sneak out at night and rob, rape, and assault the citizens of Heraclea. When the citizens complained, the tyrant shrugged: the only way to restrain the bodyguards was for the citizens to build him a walled acropolis. After ensconcing himself in his new citadel, however, Clearchus “did not check the mercenaries, but granted himself the power to wrong everyone.” Using trickery, the tyrant arrested Heraclea’s democratic Council of 300, and then he devised a vicious scheme to get rid of the rest of the dissident citizens.

  All local men between the ages sixteen and sixty-five were drafted for a bogus campaign against the Thracian city of Astachus. It was the hottest part of the summer of 360 BC, and Astachus, in western Turkey, lies in an area surrounded by marshes. Pretending that he and his mercenaries “were going to bear the brunt of the siege,” Clearchus occupied the high ground with shade trees, running water, and refreshing breezes. He commanded all the citizens to camp below in a hot, breathless swamp filled with stagnant water. To exhaust them, he ordered continual guard duty. Then he “stretched out the ‘siege’ all summer until the unhealthy marshiness of the camp killed his citizen troops.” When all of the men had died, Clearchus returned to Heraclea with his mercenaries, claiming that a plague had wiped out the citizens.15

  This story is shocking but certainly plausible. Any general of Clearchus’s day knew that troops forced to endure such conditions would succumb to the diseases we now know to be malaria and dysentery. (Perhaps there is grim satisfaction in knowing that a few years later, Clearchus himself was murdered.) The story of a tyrant who turned biological agents against his own people almost sounds too evil to be true, but there are too many modern examples to dismiss the tale as pure invention.